A picture on the title page in LaTeX

In LaTeX, there is by default no way to put a picture on the title page or cover page that is produced by \maketitle. Surprisingly, no package seemed to exist for this either. Until now, because I wrote it.

The package titlepic.sty, which can be downloaded from CTAN, is very simple and easy to use. Install it by putting it in your texmf tree and rehashing, or simply drop titlepic.sty in the same directory as your .tex source document. It works with the default document classes article, report and book.

Include it as normal, with \usepackage{titlepic}. Then, along with the usual \title, \author and \date, put a command like the following:
\titlepic{\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{cover.jpg}}
The argument to \titlepic will usually be an \includegraphics command, but it can actually be pretty much anything. The output produced by this argument will be typeset centered on the title page when you invoke \maketitle. (When you use the article document class, be sure to pass it the titlepage option, because articles do not have a title page by default.)

There are three optional arguments that control the vertical layout of the title page:

tt

Put both the title (and author, and date) and the picture at the top of the page, separated by a fixed amount of space.

tc

Put the title at the top of the page as with tt, but center the picture vertically on the page.

cc

Separate the title and the picture by a fixed amount of space, and center both together vertically on the page.

A full manual is also available. I hope this is of some use to someone. Enjoy!

Note: titlepic only works with the “standard” document classes article, report and book!. You may have some luck with other classes such as AMS, but no promises.